“The book contains relatively little-known material : it is based on the author’s own extensive field work... The analysis is organized in an innovative and illuminating manner... [it shows how] the city which mediated between the individual and the universe leads from dangerous chaos to sacred order through the use of multiple sets of symbols in their various enactments... There is no question about the superior quality of the work...it represents a welcome departure from stereotyped forms of anthropological and Ideological Interpretations and takes this Newar town and seeks to define its role for the individual as well as for the society it is based upon...Historical and comparative points of view are not neglected at all... This ultimately leads to a new understanding of the role of a Hindu city...I have no doubt that this work will become a classic in South Asian anthropology and Indology, leaving aside (its) implications for our understanding of other traditional cities in ancient European and Middle Eastern as well as more recent Oriental civilizations. That will be due to Levy’s unparalleled faculty of observing and analysing a multitude of facts ranging from individual psychology to the structure of society and its religion.”-MICHAEL WITZEL, Prof. of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University

“It is a first-rate anthropological study of Hinduism. Its publication will be welcomed by specialists in anthropology as well as in South Asian studies...the scholarship...is clearly of superior quality... there is no study with the kind of comprehensive breadth and treatment...Robert Levy and [his collaborator] Kedar Rajopadhyaya show us how to do anthropology at this time in our history.”-TRILOKI N. PANDEY, Prof. of Anthropology, University of California Santra Cruz

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Mesocosm offers an entirely new under-standing of the role of a traditional Hindu city in the lives of its inhabitants. Formerly the capital of Nepal, the city of Bhaktapur in the Kathmandu Valley was, by the mid-1970s, the last surviving example of a kind of city once characteristic of archaic civilizations. In Bhaktapur, Hinduism reached its fullest potential for organizing communities. Robert Levy was able to document Bhaktapur’s unique structure, in which the public life of the community and the private worlds of its members shared a complex social and religious relationship, before modernism overtook the city and began to transform it.

Levy views the city as a ‘mesocosm’, mediating between the microcosm of the individual and the macrocosm of the culturally conceived larger universe. With a highly integrated society and culture, organized for the most part through religious symbols, Bhaktapur is a sacred space. Roles assigned by an elaborate caste system, a pantheon of immanent gods, and the tempos and forms of the festival year and various rites of passage construct a ‘civic dance’ within that space, a web of communication and instruction which deeply affects Bhaktapur’s citizens. Hinduism and its symbolism permeate the life of the city and organize the personal experience of its inhabitants.

Levy investigates the meaning of the community to the people who live there and suggests how the religious forms that have challenged Hinduism in South—Asia–—Christianity and, above all, Is-lam—are profoundly antithetical to Hinduism as the organizing principle for cities such as Bhaktapur. Mesocosm is a ground-breaking contribution to anthropology, social and religious history, and Nepalese and South Asian studies.